Improving the customer experience and preventing identity fraud

INDUSTRY VIEW

13 September 2015

Banks now face the same challenge that retailers have seen over the last 10 years. Consumers have chosen to shop online, thanks to the combination of better service with lower prices. Footfall on the high street is down, and digital channel interaction is on the rise.

To be successful in this new environment, banks have started to introduce new apps and digital services. However, it’s important to rethink the whole process that banks take around identity. A customer’s interaction with their bank was based on the branch first, as they had to open their accounts in person in order to prevent identity fraud. Customers also had less choice over how to interact with their bank compared to now. The challenge for any bank is to work across multiple channels and improve the customer experience while also dealing with new kinds of identity fraud.

Bank staff can make decisions around identity instantly based on comparing the person in front of them against other trusted forms of identity, such as a passport photo or ID card. However, banks need to ensure that their compliance and security processes are followed to reduce risk and demonstrate that they are meeting their regulatory obligations. So how can we combine the best of the new digital world, yet retain security?

By making more use of real-time data, banks can ensure that the potential for fraud is reduced. Rather than relying on in-person form filling and laborious processes that turn away customers, new techniques like facial recognition can be used to speed up the assurance process. Using facial recognition in conjunction with passport or ID card verification as part of a new customer signup can significantly improve banks’ ability to reduce identity theft and fraud. However, it can also improve the experience for customers. In turn, this can make those customers more valuable and increase their profitability.

In order to deliver this service, Paycasso relies on DataStax Enterprise. Real-time mapping of facial features for analysis creates a huge amount of data that has to be used and analysed as it is created. DataStax meets this requirement with its secure always-on NoSQL database platform for transaction data. Using DataStax, Paycasso can scale and analyse data in real time, ensuring that a decision on identity risk can be made instantly. This approach ensures the bank follows its security and compliance best practices as well as delivering a better customer experience.

As banks build out their digital multichannel initiatives and seek to increase profitability around customer services, the role of identity assurance has to change. Replacing in-person processes with use of new technologies like facial recognition and big data analysis not only reduces the risk of identity fraud, it ensures that more customers sign up to new services. Building up this bigger picture of customers is essential to remain competitive in the new digital market; however, it has to be based on the firm foundations of identity assurance.